Creating a nation of volunteers

On Wednesday, we revealed that the formal adult volunteering rate in Scotland was 18% in 2023 – a four percentage point decline from 2022, and eight percentage points lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2019. This data is taken from the Scottish Household Survey and the 2023 data is the most up to date.

Adult formal volunteering (providing unpaid help through an organisation or group) is spiralling. Creating a nation of volunteers was never going to be easy but it now seems that bit harder.

In Scotland, we’ve always been proud of our volunteers and I like to think that helping others in this way is just part of our DNA. In reality, volunteering is truly international – almost every country in the world relies on volunteers. To indulge my parochial view for a moment, there was strong pressure at a UK level during the Covid-19 pandemic not to run a Volunteers’ Week campaign in any nation. Despite this, Volunteers’ Week continued in Scotland (online and socially distant) in large part due to the enormous support of volunteer involving organisations when given the choice – ‘should we do it, this of all years?’’. We’ve now reached 40 years of Volunteers’ Week, and each year is a choice. A choice to celebrate volunteers again and to tell every volunteer in Scotland how important they are, for the difference they make. 

I’ve said that volunteering is in crisis, and I don’t use that word lightly. This rate of decline should give cause for deep concern, not next year but right now. The structural issues that were at the heart of our volunteering context in 2023, continued throughout 2024. Why should we now expect the rate of decline to halt or even slow up? A similar decline in next year’s results and the adult volunteering rate would drop to 14% or close to half of the pre-pandemic level. A bleak prospect indeed.   

What does a decline in formal volunteering mean?

On one hand it means that the benefits that volunteering brings to individuals, organisations, communities and our society, diminish and perhaps even disappear. Until recently we’ve (conservatively) estimated that the economic value formal volunteering brings to our economy is around £2.2bn (in 2022) – calculated on the cost of replacing volunteering hours with paid hours. Last year’s decline removed more than £400m from the local economy compared to 2018 (having accounted for wage inflation).

We’ve recently started working with State of Life to analyse the social value of volunteering in Scotland. State of Life take the approach that the social value of volunteering includes several layers: the economic contribution of volunteers (through wage replacement) and the monetary value of wellbeing gains for individual volunteers and the people they reach through volunteering. Having seen the preliminary findings, I can say that the true value of volunteering is many times higher than we previously thought. We’ll be publishing this exciting new research in the new year.

What we can’t see nor put a figure on is the value of volunteering that doesn’t happen or the costs that accrue for something that isn’t there. We should be concerned by this loss and when volunteering stops being seen as an essential and rich part of all of our lives.

Our strategy is driven by volunteering decline; it is one of five key drivers. However, this rate of decline is truly sobering. While I believe our approach to creating a nation of volunteers is the right one, we need to say that we’re not happy as a society with this trend. This decline has to be stopped and ‘actually’ reversed if we want to live in a better Scotland.

As a society we continue to make decisions that erode volunteering and speed the rate of decline. Now is the time to reframe the ‘state of volunteering’ as a crisis that needs urgent response, collaboration at all levels and different and perhaps even radical solutions.

We’re not alone, other UK nations are looking to Scotland and seeing their own volunteering context. 

Now is the time for courage and for action. We’re focused on creating a nation of volunteers and thinking differently about the changes this demands. Care to join us?